Sunday morning, the woman woke up to find the daughter next to her in bed. She left the bedroom. She went to the kitchen. Light filtered in through the embrasures, constricted but intense. She moved around the room. From every slit, on each wall, that dazzling sun, and segments of the town, immersed in a din that merged with the light. The woman took a tranquillizer, because the left side of her chest was hurting, and she made herself some coffee, which she drank from a bowl, without sugar, with a little milk. Then she started to smoke.

They’d already used up the water in the bathroom. It shut off at seven, they would turn it on again in the evening. She washed up with what was left in the tank and glanced, with remote satisfaction, at the voluminous hairstyle, Geisha-like, that the hairdresser had given her the day before, which still looked good.

The house was familiar to her, like his previous ones.

While she smoked and drank coffee in the narrow kitchen, waiting for the tranquillizer to get rid of the tightness in her chest – enveloped by the din of voices that came from down below – the others woke up. There wasn’t much in the house for breakfast. And so they decided to go to the sea, and to have breakfast at a bar. But before heading out, the daughter wanted her mother to explore the tower the way she had, excited, in the dark, the night before. The woman didn’t want to; she felt crabby, and didn’t want to pretend to be charmed. But she went.

The light, which had been broken up, in the rooms, by the slender contours of the embrasures, reassembled in a circle at the top of the tower: the red roof-tiles of the town, the ilex-lined avenue, the piazza in front of the castle with a horrid white statue of San Francesco from the 1930s² (replacing the usual unknown soldier), the orange and yellow fields, the lakes formed by the distant lagoon, the narrow strip of beach, the sea, the islands; all of it bathed in the clear, fresh, strong September light.

They went into town. A few small shops, built up around the castle, replacing the old stables and oil mills. The bar, the dairy, the barber. They entered the bar thronged with men: the woman ordered a brandy, the daughter had a buondì snack and a fruit juice, the father a coffee. While waiting for the bus they walked around the little streets: houses painted white, with peppers and tomatoes hung out to dry, and chairs, those too hung up high, on hooks; there were large plates of figs exposed to the sun, and conserves kept safe from children and animals. They felt a bit uncomfortable walking there, because every tiny alley was like a house, and people in those nestled towns weren’t used to tourists. They proceeded to walk along the walls, which had small dwellings built into them. The daughter was tired of walking and seeing stones, fields, houses.